In her review of the concert in The New York Times, Vivian Schweitzer wrote: “Mr. Dellaira set his engaging, vividly scored “Nobody” to Emily Dickinson’s poem “I’m Nobody! Who Are You?” The oboe provided a dramatic underscoring for the increasing urgency of the word ‘nobody,’ a connecting theme in the piece.”

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PROGRAM NOTE

NOBODY – Program notes
“I’m Nobody! Who are you?” So begins one of Emily Dickinson’s best-known poems. Though her question is rhetorical, it’s hard not to detect in these words just a touch of sarcasm. And who can tell if she’s being straight with us later in the poem when she says, “how dreary, to be Somebody.”
Nobody is based on four of Dickinson’s poems, each containing the word “nobody.” In “Have you got a Brook in your little heart?” Dickinson tells us “nobody knows that any brook is there”, and yet describes the brook as only someone who knows it can. Is the brook known only to her? She’s certainly not, then, a nobody.
In “On such a night,” Dickinson again reflects on what nobodys we are, noting how quietly each of us passes from existence, without fanfare, so quiet “that nobody might know.” And in the poem “When they come back – if Blossoms do”, Dickinson asks what tomorrow brings. Will she see it? And will anybody care?
This is heady, if gloomy, stuff. Yet Dickinson’s language (note, for example, the way she plays off “nobody” with the words “anybody” and “somebody”) and her rhythms are as disarmingly direct as a folk song. That’s partly why I’ve tried to infuse the sensibility of folk music into each of the four sections.
The chorus is, as ever, our window into humanity. You, me, the person next to you, the crowd: a collection of anybodys and somebodys — and nobodys. Then there’s the oboe, who, like Dickinson herself, keeps a slight distance from the crowd (her claim to being nobody, notwithstanding.) Like her, the oboe is the keen observer, answering questions we didn’t realize we’ve asked. (And by the way, it’s hard to say “nobody” without hearing the faint echo of the word “oboe.”)
Commissioned by The Syracuse Vocal Ensemble, Nobody is inspired by White Heat, Brenda Wineapple’s moving book about the friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. My thanks to The New Amsterdam Singers and Clara Longstreth for this New York City premiere of Nobody and for their many suggestions and corrections along the way; I echo Ms. Dickinson’s reply to Mr. Higginson, after he’d edited some of her poems: “Thank you for the surgery. It was not so painful as I supposed.”
Michael Dellaira